Wednesday, November 21, 2012

I already felt this way due to the day it is falling on this year; however, I feel even less so given Israel's current war criminal foray into Gaza.Rather than celebrate AmeriKan greed and gluttony I'd rather reflect on the day November 22 and celebrate a man's vision....

"Commencement Address at American University in Washington, June 10, 1963

.... I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived -- yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

The man did have amazing insight.

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

When I repeat that passage to myself as I walk through my day sometimes it nearly brings me to tears. The fact is, 49 years later, life on earth is not worth living for so many.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by 11 of the Allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use the is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles -- which can only destroy and never create -- is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men.

And that is why we do not have it.

I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war -- and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task....

Maybe I will drop a thankful I don't live in the Gaza Strip at the gathering this year -- as the group looks at me not knowing what I am talking about (frown).

Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.... No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.... For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

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